THE SOCIOLOGY OF MILITARY SCIENCE: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design

Garcia, Lt Col Michelle, Military Review

THE SOCIOLOGY OF MILITARY SCIENCE: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design Dr. Chris Paparone, Bloomsbury, New York, 2013, 232 pages, $29.95

Paparone built on his earlier works to produce a monograph that is described in several book advertisements as offering "fresh sociological avenues to become more institutionally reflexive." The premise of the monograph is that military knowledge has been institutionalized to the point that the military community is blind to viable alternative military design methodologies. The monograph treats military orga- nizations and military interventions as complex social phenomena and uses sociology as the basis for further inquiry with the purpose of answering the question: "Can there be a variety of ontological, epistemological, and methodological frames of reference for the design of militaries and their interventions?"

Readers familiar with the works of Karl Mannheim, Kurt Wolff, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Nicholas Rescher, Thomas Kuhn, Alfred Schutz, Karl Weick, and Max Weber will enjoy the mental dissec- tion of the current modernist view of military design and the reframing Paparone describes using various social constructs. For readers who are unfamiliar with the professional, academic terms of the social sciences, have a dictionary on hand and start with chapter 5, The Reconstruction of Military Profession. I recommend this chapter as a starting point for a reader familiar with the military but unfamiliar with the social scienc- es because it relates concepts of social science to known terms and situations in the military. …

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